1. Technical Field
The present invention relates in general to the field of integrated circuits, and in particular to integrated circuits that have chains of multiple components. Still more particularly, the present invention relates to a method and system for throttling down, shutting down, or providing additional cooling to one or more of the chains when one or more of the components in the chain becomes too thermally hot.
2. Description of the Related Art
Components in integrated circuits are often heat sensitive. In particular, when a component experiences overuse, such as being imposed upon to handle excessive bandwidth or to perform an excessive number of computations, that component can become overheated to the point of becoming unstable or even damaged.
In the prior art, thermal monitoring of such components has been typically performed at the component level, and thus required a different monitoring circuit for each specific component. When the components are slaves to a master controller, then the master controller must have a different pin allocated to each of the slave components being monitored. Such a situation becomes untenable when hundreds or thousands of slaves are monitored by the master controller.